Paper 01
For discussion
Prepared byPaul Bradbury
NED & Technology Advisor
AI is new. The question is old. It stops at the board.
Non-executive director, technology advisor and mentor. I give boards and founders a senior technical voice in the room where AI decisions get made. I don't build it. I make sure it can be trusted.
01
The gap
StatusUnresolved
Your board is accountable for AI it cannot assess.
The people building your AI are the only ones assessing it. You ask a question. The answer comes back in the same words as the slide, and nobody in the room can tell you whether that was an answer or a dodge.
Software used to make suggestions. A person decided, and their name was on it. Now the software decides and nobody's name is on it. Ask who is accountable now and watch the pause. You answer that in the boardroom or you answer it during the incident, which is a poor time to be reading your own org chart.
02
Matters arising
OwnerNot recorded
AI doesn't create fragility. It reveals it.
-
The board
Accountable for the decision
-
The executive
Owns the system
-
The model
Decides. Named nowhere.
Look closely at an AI failure and the model is rarely what broke. The boundary was already unclear. The ownership was already vague. Both survived for years because nothing moved fast enough to expose them.
The chain doesn't break. It just stops having names in it.
03
Supporting papers
SourceSynaptic Pixels
Written for the people who have to sign it off.
Not for the people building it.
- Automation & Control Where does your dark factory stop? FANUC's robots build robots for weeks with nobody on the floor. The part worth copying is duller than the robotics: knowing exactly where the lights come back on.
- Delivery & Governance The software factory you didn't notice you'd built Sensible automations, each gated and argued over on its own, add up to a production line that nobody designed.
- Delivery & Governance When the loop rewrites its own prompt, what are you approving? GEPA is sold as the end of manual prompt engineering. The harder question is what you are signing off once the loop edits itself.
04
Standing
BasedWest Sussex, UK
Paul Bradbury
In 1994 I was elected to the board of WebPro, one of three associations that merged to become the Association of Internet Professionals. I chaired AIP from 2000 to 2001. It represented 8,500 members across 50 countries, ran thirty chapters from London to Los Angeles, set the first accreditation standards for an industry that had none and pressed ICANN to be accountable to a membership rather than an interim board.
We were writing rules for a technology arriving faster than anyone could write them. The crash took most of our members' jobs, and a professional association is its members, so it did not survive them.
The argument we were having then, about who is accountable for a technology nobody can govern quickly enough, is the argument I am in now.
Since then: technology and operations across EMEA at Tigerspike, scaling the team from 10 to over 70 and opening offices in Dubai and Poland, delivering for The Economist, Shell and Emirates Airlines. Then six years as CTO of Radiate B2B, rebuilding a platform and a team before building the AI agent that changed how the business ran.
I hold a fractional CTO practice through Freeman Clarke. Through Binary Glide I take non-executive, advisory and mentoring work. The separation is deliberate. One runs technology inside a business. The other holds it to account from outside.
Paul Bradbury
Binary Glide Limited
Delivered for
- The Economist
- Shell
- Emirates Airlines
- Tigerspike
- Radiate B2B
05
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